Culture and Imperialism

Product Information

Scholars can be frankly engaged in the politics and interests of the present- with open eyes, rigorous analytical energy, and the decently social values of those who are concerned with the survival neither of a disciplinary fiefdom or guild nor of a manipulative identity like ‘India’ or ‘America’, but with the improvement and non-coercive enhancement of life in a community struggling to exist among other communities…What matters a great deal more than the stable identity kept current in official discourse is the contestatory force of an interpretive method whose material is the disparate, but intertwined and interdependent, and above all overlapping streams of historical experience. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

He's largely un-jargony, with the exception of some mentions of "universalizing discourses" here and there. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. He makes countless citations of literary work from different parts of the world, and he analyzes the literature so seriously that it almost seems like he’s the only one in class paying attention. Said says that West has positioned itself as a self-evidently superior, independently developed culture that naturally should share its civilization with inferior others via colonization, which is almost always a product of imperialism.

There are strikingly important points that Edward Said makes at the very end of this book that were reminiscent of Amin Maalouf’s “In the Name of Identity, Violence and the Need to Belong.

The Age of Empire, a term coined by historian Eric Hobsbawm in his classic anthology narrating the rise of European Bourgeois society and industrial capitalism, seems long behind us.Fox and Partha Chatterjee suggest crucial modifications of Said’s opposition between the West and the colonized, arguing that nationalist opposition developed out of Western orientalist constructs. As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient.